ジュディーと冒険 (2) The Adventurous Judy

(1)  Jerusha had an imagination--an imagination, Mrs. Lippett told her, that would get her into trouble if she didn't take care--but keen as it was, it could not carry her beyond the front porch of the houses she would enter.  Poor, eager, adventurous little Jerusha, in all her seventeen years, had never stepped inside an ordinary house; she could not picture the daily routine of those other human beings who carried on their lives undiscommoded by orphans.
("Blue Wednesday")

(2)  You only wanted to hear from me once a month, didn't you?  And I've been peppering you with letters every few days!  But I've been so excited about all these new adventures that I MUST talk to somebody; and you're the only one I know.  Please excuse my exuberance; I'll settle pretty soon.  If my letters bore you, you can always toss them into the wastebasket.  I promise not to write another till the middle of November.
(October 25)

(3)                                         After chapel, Thursday

     What do you think is my favourite book?  Just now, I mean; I change every three days.  Wuthering Heights.  Emily Bronte was quite young when she wrote it, and had never been outside of Haworth churchyard.  She had never known any men in her life; how COULD she imagine a man like Heathcliffe?
     I couldn't do it, and I'm quite young and never outside the John Grier Asylum--I've had every chance in the world.  Sometimes a dreadful fear comes over me that I'm not a genius.  Will you be awfully disappointed, Daddy, if I don't turn out to be a great author?  In the spring when everything is so beautiful and green and budding, I feel like turning my back on lessons, and running away to play with the weather.  There are such lots of adventures out in the fields!  It's much more entertaining to live books than to write them.


(4)  He [Jervis Pendleton] spent the summer here once after he had been ill, when he was about eleven years old; and he left On the Trail behind.  It looks well read--the marks of his grimy little hands are frequent!  Also in a corner of the attic there is a water wheel and a windmill and some bows and arrows.  Mrs. Semple talks so constantly about him that I begin to believe he really lives--not a grown man with a silk hat and walking stick, but a nice, dirty, tousle-headed boy who clatters up the stairs with an awful racket, and leaves the screen doors open, and is always asking for cookies.  (And getting them, too, if I know Mrs. Semple!) He seems to have been an adventurous little soul--and brave and truthful.  I'm sorry to think he is a Pendleton; he was meant for something better.

(5)  Don't be outraged, Daddy.  I am not intimating that the John Grier Home
was like the Lowood Institute.  We had plenty to eat and plenty to wear, sufficient water to wash in, and a furnace in the cellar.  But there was one deadly likeness.  Our lives were absolutely monotonous and uneventful.  Nothing nice ever happened, except ice-cream on Sundays, and even that was regular.  In all the eighteen years I was there I only had one adventure--when the woodshed burned.  We had to get up in the night and dress so as to be ready in case the house should catch.  But it didn't catch and we went back to bed.
(May 4)

(6)  During our week of rain I sat up in the attic and had an orgy of reading--Stevenson, mostly.  He himself is more entertaining than any of the characters in his books; I dare say he made himself into the kind of hero that would look well in print.  Don't you think it was perfect of him to spend all the ten thousand dollars his father left, for a yacht, and go sailing off to the South Seas?  He lived up to his adventurous creed.  If my father had left me ten thousand dollars, I'd do it, too.  The thought of Vailima makes me wild.  I want to see the tropics.  I want to see the whole world.  I am going to be a great author, or artist, or actress, or playwright--or whatever sort of a great person I turn out to be.  I have a terrible wanderthirst; the very sight of a map makes me want to put on my hat and take an umbrella and start.  "I shall see before I die the palms and temples of the South."
(August 10)

(7)  It's awfully funny to think of that great big, long-legged man (he's nearly as long-legged as you, Daddy) ever sitting in Mrs. Semple's lap and having his face washed.  Particularly funny when you see her lap!  She has two laps now, and three chins.  But he says that once she was thin and wiry and spry and could run faster than he.
     Such a lot of adventures we're having!  We've explored the country for miles, and I've learned to fish with funny little flies made of feathers.  Also to shoot with a rifle and a revolver.  Also to ride horseback--there's an astonishing amount of life in old Grove.  We fed him on oats for three days, and he shied at a calf and almost ran away with me.
(August 25)

(8)  Give the Home my love, please--my TRULY love.  I have quite a feeling of tenderness for it as I look back through a haze of four years.  When I first came to college I felt quite resentful because I'd been robbed of the normal kind of childhood that the other girls had had; but now, I don't feel that way in the least.  I regard it as a very unusual adventure.  It gives me a sort of vantage point from which to stand aside and look at life.  Emerging full grown, I get a perspective on the world, that other people who have been brought up in the thick of things entirely lack.
(March 5)

(9)  What do you think is my latest activity, Daddy?  You will begin to believe that I am incorrigible--I am writing a book.  I started it three weeks ago and am eating it up in chunks.  I've caught the secret.  Master Jervie and that editor man were right; you are most convincing when you write about the things you know.  And this time it is about something that I do know--exhaustively.  Guess where it's laid?  In the John Grier Home!  And it's good, Daddy, I actually believe it is--just about the tiny little things that happened every day.  I'm a realist now.  I've abandoned romanticism; I shall go back to it later though, when my own adventurous future begins.
     This new book is going to get itself finished--and published!  You see if it doesn't. If you just want a thing hard enough and keep on trying, you do get it in the end.  I've been trying for four years to get a letter from you--and I haven't given up hope yet.
(April 4)

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